Shamanism is a dimension of human experience that can be found in every culture in any age.It can be observed in a variety of forms, ranging from a fundamental spontaneous experience, derivative culturally shared practices, or as veiled motifs of spiritual, medical, artistic, scientific, and psychotherapeutic interventions.

Paradoxically, as shamanism becomes more culturally shared, it may become less authentic—less culturally challenging—and degenerative.Provoked by an experience of everyday life as a sort of “half-truth,” shamanism is a method that focuses on the erroneous belief in a separation of human life from nature.Shamanism focuses specifically on remaining alert to the creatural dimensions of human life that can be overridden by cultural, socio-psychological dimensions of everyday life.

Shamanism is an expression of an enduring wild state to remain alert to the changing conditions of existence and integrate into the natural world that continues to design and express human life across the long run.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

IN THE ARCTIC tundra, nearly an invisible speck in a vast
terrain, a young adult, sits by a large boulder, leaning into the boulder,
grinding another hand-held stone into the boulder in a circle. Mid-continent, an elderly person walks
about, picking up a stone that has attracted this person, then, listens to the
stone. Nearby, small stones are
collected—a specific number—to be placed in a rattle. Deeply south, another person gazes into the randomized
surface of a fire-charred board, listening. The drum beats with a pulse rather than a rhythm.

What is occurring here and how could it have meaning?

Pursued repetition and randomness is a response that aspires
to re-open a door that seemed to describe reality. It was likely provoked by a spontaneous experience that
something valuable, even crucial for the long run of human life, was being
overlooked.

Such experiences may be akin to toiling over the mathematics
of molecules, and then, serendipitously, opening a heretofore, unseen structure
that changes everything forever.
Where imagination can be more than fact (as Einstein as admonished us),
the “emptiness” of the universe has a form, where, for Einstein, mass might
roll like a ball bearing over hill and dale; and (beyond Einstein) this mass,
that wears the appearance of being the bones of universe itself, may be nearly
next to nothing in a universe of unseen dark matter, that is perhaps lost
further in multiverses and/or parallel universes, and terrains yet to be
imagined.

The blue sky is not blue. The hard tabletop is moving at incredible speeds that give
it its “hardness.” The sun,
rolling to the West and then settling there, is not rolling to the West, nor is
it rising in the East and setting in the West. Our eyes see the world upside down, but we perceive it as
right side up. The color of nearly
anything is the color that it casts off rather than its true color. Our “individual” acts tend to be rather
universal archetypes dressed up in contemporary clothing. And our most advanced technologies
become archaic—still beautiful—yet crude, in next to no time at all.

This is the context that continues to drive shamanism to be
vitally present in any era. Yes,
there is a “Romantic shamanism” that aspires to honor traditional expressions
of shamanism, much in the manner of reenactments of the American civil war or
Japanese samurai tradition. But
shamanism is a living dimension of human experience that challenges an everyday
that seems to be distanced from the Earth and the larger landscape. It says that which our most rational
science keeps saying to us in increasingly explicit measures: that we are
deeply lost in the universe, young in the Earth, and designed by it.

What if a tree was the sun on Earth, which is what it
is? We imaging the sun to be
shining down on us, but we are inside the outer rim of the sun and an
expression of its ongoing evolution, where macromolecules have a niche where
they can occur. It is a
dream to presume that we are somehow on top of such terrain.

Shamanism gets co-opted into serving our needs. But authentic shamanism, or authentic
human life, is deeply naturalistic, and this changes the questions that we
bring. This is why we continue to
be drawn to it, to try to align with a core dynamic that we require to both
sustain across the long run and to optimize.

In my city, a child, age 12, remarkably writes in school,

…. The silver-lined storm clouds

Gather
like old friends

Then
rumble, hesitant

Water dripping from their

bellies

Then
send a crackling

Bolt
of yellow fire

Towards
me

My
white fur freezes

My
body tenses

Then
lightning engulfs me

My bones itch with raw

energy

I
am a ball of glinting flames

Sparks
fly from my fur

The
rain does not touch me

Even
it is afraid

Such language is not science, but it evokes a sense of
something profoundly real. It
attends to a critical process that we erroneously proscribe from our life in
nearly any society, from the primal through the post-industrial. The critical dynamic in human life is creatural, far more than cultural, social or psychological
orientations that are remarkably biased and blind. Our bicameral brain—young, and still in development—dissects
experience more than integrates experience. The core integration to optimize our perception is
enduringly/eternally naturalistic, eco-inseparable, wild, and ongoing
creationist.

A rather rational repetition and randomization, far more
than intoxication or hallucination or ecstasy, are the wild first steps to
attend to overlooked and intentionally proscribed experiences. The wildness of the mind, for at
least small glints of time can peer into the dark, and become the landscape. Then perhaps, the key dynamic of all
“wildness”—that of remaining alert to the changing conditions of existence in a
cosmos that is largely unknown to us—can be activated. The success that our greatest
rational discoveries have had likely comes from the enduring presence of core
shamanic methodology that provoked a serendipitous turn in our
understanding. And those
great turns always point toward the natural. While shamanic motifs may be present in culture, authentic
shamanism differs in its more intensive step out of culture to deeply taste the
creatural [Homo sapiens, “Earth
taster”].

Shamanism has been associated with irrationality, but, when
authentic, it aspires to look deeply at experience, because of a sense that our
view is biased and irrational.
Shamanism is popularly perceived as eccentric/extreme, archaic, and
continuing as a set of spiritist beliefs primarily in “Third World/Fourth
World” societies. Shamanic motifs
are present in many beliefs systems, but authentic shamanism is a methodology
rather than a belief system.
Further, there is a popular association between shamanism and
hallucinogens as methodology.
Plants that intoxicate may be functioning to disable organisms rather
than “speak” to partakers. In
Shamanism, Mircea Eliade describes the
use of intoxicants in shamanism as a late or “derivative” “corrupt”
practice. While intoxicants
positively demonstrate that ordinary reality can be altered and that an
everyday perspective may be biased that can open a latent spirituality,
intoxicants may act more as a universal cultural “escape” or “release” rather
than as direct entry into a deeper reality.

Fundamentally, shamanism is not about knowledge of the
landscape being utilized for curing, healing, finding, or empowering, all of
which are key elements in derivative practices that are popularly associated
with shamanism. Rather than
being co-opted into practices as either an obscure or very explicit motif,
shamanism sustains when it is totemic, serving the landscape rather than using
the landscape, and this changes all of the questions and demands that people
bring to shamanism. Paradoxically,
by serving the landscape and becoming fitted with it, human life is optimized.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

PERHAPS ON some occasion when we have some moments to give
over, we decide to press a little further into landscape.

Perhaps we bundle up and sit down into the landform, letting
all of our senses be taken.

Perhaps we stay up a little later and go out into the dark
to gaze into the night sky that slo-turns worlds above us.

Perhaps we meander in some
very common place, paying special attention to the small details—ants, pebbles,
or to the eloquent rivering in the surface of leaves.

Perhaps we go further in our intention, and give up some
food.Perhaps we work muscles that
we seldom use.

Perhaps we lie down on our backs in wild grasses, walled by
the tall culms. Disappearing, with the sky overhead opening up.After a time, perhaps, grasshoppers
begin to encircle us, and when we don’t move, the come down and bite us, and
our sense of dominance is taken.

Perhaps we lie on our bellies on the front of a sandbar with
eyes forward—level with the water—into the down streaming river that is coming
toward us.Our eyes dance
with the flow of water and, in the summer, with the arabesques of swallows
skimming the surface of the river.

Perhaps we amble about on the river’s edge, with eyes cast
down into the cobble cast up by spring floods, looking for a particular
stone—perhaps on this day, finding a blackened elk tooth—that seems to call out
to us.

Perhaps we gaze into a small fire, its smoke shifting to
wash over us as the wind shifts.

In these small things, we find our larger, enduring life, and perhaps sense that we have been spending
too much of the currency of our time in routine on the fringe of the aliveness
of the Earth.

And because of this, despite all the captivation of
civility, perhaps we awaken and go farther, becoming shamanic:

Without
nourishment

Listen to the
wind, to the tree branches, to the birds.

Listen to the
little herbs in the under story of the forest and to the ants.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

THE GAZE OF ANIMALS toward us acknowledges us as other
animals rather than as something separate and above.But
when we return the gaze, the humanness, for example, of trees can seem to be
such a disparate view for us, as if humanness is ours alone.A phrase, such as Trees in
their humanness [Lisel Mueller, from
“Necessities,” Alive Together]
may read as an oxymoron, as impossible.

Far more disparate than finding our humanness in trees,
going even deeper, there is this very real way that

We walk about in
the footsteps of birds.

We sit down as
pools of rain

And we stand up as
uncoiling seeds.

There is within
you and I this moon.

There is within us
a field of grass in wind.

There is within us
the walking of ants.

There is this way that, for example, we might rationally
understand that we have been contrived from stone—star matter.But going even further, there is more
perplexing way in which

All the stones
have been us

[W. S. Merwin, from
“Eyes of Summer,”

Writings To An
Unfinished Accompaniment].

How could this be, when stone predates us; we, who are so
very young in the history of the Earth?While such views can appear to be esoteric poetic musings, the writers
intended them to be descriptive of an unseen reality.Ultimately, such statements are offered because they are
felt to be deeply practical and to have something important to say to us.Our inability to envision events in
such a manner might be lamentable as a measure of our limits, and perhaps even
dangerous for survival across the long run of things.

The effusive body of the shaman is self-as-landscape.

Humanness is more than human beings. Events that can appear
to be very distanced from us, such as rain and seed are, in fact, most
intimate, even more intimate that we are to each other.

The holy water that is rain and the seed that is grain—the
dominant forces that continue to buoy up the most advanced post-industrial,
cybernetic culture—are present daily, and are the core of our immanent
survival.Every inhalation is also
flora’s exhalation.And across the
long run of things, the flora and waters out of which grain and drink and
breath emerge continue to speak “humanely” to us with a wisdom that offers us
an optimal way forward were we to awaken to it and listen.